


Drink the Earth

by Dolorosa



Category: The Queens of Innis Lear - Tessa Gratton
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 02:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16801876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/pseuds/Dolorosa
Summary: Ban returns to Innis Lear, but the cost of that return is his transformation into a forest spirit, part of the fabric of the land. The trees — and Elia — welcome him home.





	Drink the Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jasminetea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasminetea/gifts).



Elia found him in the grove.

She who had spent so much of her recent life tormented with indecision, so accustomed to passivity as a reaction to the crushing fear that any choice she made would be the wrong one, had been so sure, so certain in her decision when they parted. The sheer relief that when she finally _did_ make decisions — choices which reverberated around Innis Lear, their consequences rippling beyond the island — they were respected had made her double down on her certainty. He had hurt her. He had betrayed Innis Lear, the very earth that sang his name. She never wanted to see him again. She was certain. But in the quiet moments when she was alone (rare though these were, as a queen, she discovered, was needed by everyone, her time and symbolic presence very much not her own), in the fretful hours between dark and dawn, when she woke and worried at problems pushed aside during daylight, she had found herself speculating about where he had gone. She had caught herself casting her mind back to their parting, and wondering if she had been right to be so certain, so final.

A great deal of time had passed since then, rushing along, marked by Elia in the changing sweep of the stars of the night sky, healing her and helping her grow into her queenship. And when she felt she was ready, she took herself on a circuit of the island, walking every road and tiny animal track, visiting every house and hall, drinking from every spring and river, to reintroduce herself to Innis Lear, to weave herself back into the fabric of the island until every tree and hill and stone sang her name. Aefa, Rory, and Kayo came with her for part of her journey, but there were some places where only a queen should tread, and so for much of her circuit Elia found herself alone, her feet soft and sure as she followed the narrow, winding tracks between the trees and rocks and rushing water. At the very midpoint of her journey, she found herself walking strange paths, the dusk air shifting and shimmering, the trees around her changing imperceptibly. She was in the island's hidden heart, among trees so old they whispered names of kings and queens she had never even heard of, an endless litany of the rulers of Innis Lear, her own name among them like a feather, flickering on the breeze. And then the air stirred, and the leaves at the forest's crown parted, revealing the silvery light of the rising moon, and Elia saw him.

He was thin and pale as he had always been, but he was different: the dissatisfaction and fury and wounded, guarded tension — the anticipation of contempt and rejection — was gone from his expression, replaced with a calm resolution. He had survived the injuries done to him, but he was altered, transformed into something new. The trees welcomed him home. It was as if he were something ancient, at once otherworldly and of the earth, a being of leaves and sap and rootwater. He leaned against the sighing trees of Innis Lear's oldest forest, and waited. She closed the space between them, and, after a slight, tense hesitation, took his hand. Their fingers were cold as they twined together. She followed him into the dark.

*

She never tried to make him leave — his return had not been without cost, and one such cost was his confinement to the grove, to the twilight, to the in-between places — but she found herself going to him whenever she stood on a problem's threshold. She went for companionship, for kindness, for support, to figure out how to approach the difficulties she encountered during her rule. To ask the earth, and hear its answers.

She was not a queen who ruled alone — she had learnt from Lear's mistakes — and so she surrounded herself with those whose counsel she trusted: Kayo for advice on trade and seafaring, Rory and Aefa for gossip (for, as she had learnt from them, truths were often muttered in the margins long before they were spoken in public), Brona for her work on reforming worship on the island, and a cautious correspondence by letter with the women of Aremoria, to help her teach herself their kind of subtle diplomacy. But there were struggles where even these advisors' expertise couldn't help, and that was when she found herself drifting back to the grove, and Ban.

They never spoke much to each other, during these meetings. They didn't have to — theirs was a wordless understanding, a need that existed outside Elia's everyday demands of court, and trade, and diplomacy. Something that slipped in between the cracks of her carefully constructed armour, her public face as the reforming queen who brought balance to all things. She needed Ban for all those thorny problems that brought that balance into question. And, wordlessly, he understood what she needed in those quiet moments in the grove. She would listen to the cold, austere clarity of the watching stars, just beginning to appear in the evening sky, and he would listen to the wild chaos of the earth, and trees, and rootwater, and, together, they would decide what to do.

*

'Am I the only one who sees you?' she asked him, during a visit just before the midpoint of autumn, when the leaves glowed red and gold in the canopy above them. They lay tangled in the roots of a twisted tree, Ban tracing idle patterns in the bare skin of Elia's upper arm and shoulder.

There was a pause before he replied, a sense that he was struggling to describe in words what he knew in blood and bone, in roots and sinew.

'You are the queen,' he said. 'You are the mediator between earth and sky, between land and people. It's only right that some parts of Innis Lear are visible only to you.'

He pressed a kiss into Elia's collarbone, and she sighed into his touch, gripping his wrists, pulling him closer. As they curled into each other they sank towards the forest floor. The damp autumn leaves lay against Elia's hands and tangled into her hair, and the earth itself seemed to embrace them. The land felt as if it danced beneath them, alive with a kind of restless joy. And, though they were so focused on each other that everything else seemed to fall away, they heard the land speak to them.

 _Elia!_ said the island. _Elia! Elia, queen!_ And then, softly, more subtly, like a fox, slipping through the shadows, _earthsaint_.

The moon rose, its light pooling, silver and shining, on the pair in the grove. Vines had come coiling down from all the trees, twisting their way towards Ban and Elia. Roses bloomed, unseasonably, sprouting from beneath the fallen leaves, curling and winding over their arms, embracing them as they embraced each other, binding them together and to the land itself, reluctant to ever let them go. A tendril of vine flowed over Elia's brow, tracing a path like the memory of a hemlock crown. Thorny twists of roses twined around Ban and Elia's clasped hands, scattering petals across the autumn leaves. Above them the stars soared unnoticed, tracking their course across the sky, pointing the way towards myriad, branching futures.


End file.
